My bout with racism

I voted for Obama. Let’s just get that out there. I’m neither Republican nor Democratic, but I felt like I related more to Obama and supported his views for America more than Mitt Romney.

Coming from the state and even the city that the current president comes from is….challenging. Anytime he’s in town, everything shuts down. FBI agents swarm and infiltrate Chicago. People just get…strange.

So I should have expected the racism that I was exposed to on the train yesterday…but I never wanted to think that people were capable of this.

I was walking down the underground tunnel to the train platform. Before I went down the last set of stairs I noticed two women who were walking quickly and talking animatedly. I thought they were friends. They continued on to the same train car that I went into. I sat down and then fully heard the two women. They weren’t friends. They were SCREAMING at one another—very much enemies.

For the sake of better explaining the significance of their argument, I’ll say one was an overweight white woman, maybe in her late 20s, early 30s. The other was an overweight black woman, maybe in her late 40s, early 50s.

The black woman was screaming at the white woman. Threatening to slap her multiple times over for shoving her while coming down the stairs. The white woman was staring ahead, trying to ignore her, listening to ear buds. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened. But to follow someone from the street? Down two flights of stairs, into a hallway, onto a train platform, and into a specific car through multiple train stops? Seems like harassment to me.

This woman said every curse word known to man. Brought her mother’s values and upbringing into it, and then started bashing white women in general and their intelligence. The white woman told her to sit down, angrily, which only got the black woman going again. Eventually, she sat down.

But it didn’t end there. The car was full of black women, and they all loudly started bitching about white women. How it served her right to be bitched out. She probably deserved it. More curse words. More racial slurs. And then…Obama was brought into it.

Obama. Their black president. Who was only working toward the good of the black community. Who we would never appreciate. And then they said that all white people, white women in particular, were trying to push him out of office by voting for Mitt Romney. How we would ruin the U.S. and how he needed to be killed.

One of the women (larger, more overweight, but very short), decided the next stop was her stop. So she launched herself onto the people who were standing in the train car. She knocked down every single white woman that was standing. Didn’t say excuse me. Just laughed and got off the train.

Again…more heckles from the other black women on the train. More horrible racial slurs. More threats of death. And then they started to get up and spread out in the car.

I had mace in my pocket, but that wasn’t going to do much against that many of them. I really did fear for my safety.

They started screaming at the people standing. The white people in the car tried to catch each other’s eyes. It was BAD.

Thankfully the train stopped and I got out. I didn’t look back, just walked straight across the platform and into the next train. But I did glance back to see the train conductor entering that car. Talking to them.

I hope to god he did something. And that they listened. He was black, which made me think they did.

But why do I even have to think that? Why should it matter? Why did they have to bring race into it?